s u m m e r
direct current
I'm sure it seemed like a great idea at the time. I'm sure it did. It had to. There's no other way I can feel about it now and have it reside in my head with any semblance of feeling. It was a fucking great idea!
Friday was actually cool and after a few drinks and a walk I heard the distant whump, whump, whump...bam. Fireworks down by the ballpark on Yancyville. I ever mention we have the oldest minor league park in the country? In the summer, especially the late summer, the evening sky is filled at each home game with green, white, red, and sometimes purple fireworks. Friday was even better because we had a fair amount of heat lightening mixed in and it reflected nicely off the oneway glass of the office buildings downtown.
I thought about going to the city club, but a tie and coat were quite far from my mind and my reach. I was in fact in Green Hill cemetery looking for some quiet when the barrage hit. I was sitting in the circle that forms the Knowles plot. No doubt an affluent family back in the day. They've an obelisk thirty feet high surrounded by four life-size stone muses. One lost a head recently to an act of vandalism, but the rest are pure and complete with a hint of green moss, their expressions smoothed by rain.
Being alone at Green Hill isn't the most pleasant feeling, but it is one place in town you're sure to get real silence. Acres and acres of it. Plenty of huge elms and oaks mixed with a few magnolias.
So I'm sitting at the base of the Knowles obelisk when I realize I just really have not had enough to drink. It is one of those last summer nights when I feel the cool air on my face and I let it remind me of my father and afternoons that never really took place except in dreams. Afternoons where I helped him work on the car and he drank PBR and smiled at me with a greasy face.
Horribly random thought to let creep into my head, but like I said it seemed a good idea at the time. Most of the time my father and I've spent together in my childhood I had to make up. And I sat there thinking about the dreamlike sunshine and our old brick house in Charlotte and the oil stained carport. I thought of that one scene in Red Cherry when ChuChu must explain the fate of her father in China. How he was cut in half at the waist by a hay sickle, and how he still refused to die, holding her gaze...the children will carry on.
I smoked another cigarette, cursed the habit, and went back to the iron gate. Up and over and down to Aitch's place. It's the only bar in town I know that actually serves PBR and it's always cold and always cheap. I saddled up on an incredibly worn stool and talked slowly with the bartender about her daughter. Fifteen is a lonely age no matter how cool or understanding your parents are. PBR after PBR went down and I was glad I walked. Each beer I drank was colder and more like time with my father should have been. The memories began to trick me. Wait a second, did that one actually happen? Perhaps.
I let Theo's conversation encircle me and I traded made up bits about what I'd do if I were a dad and by God how good a dad I was gonna be and all because my own dad and I were so close. "That close," I'd motion, holding up one hand with my thumb and index finger almost touching.
"Another PBR?"
"Yeah, why not, another PBR, hell, might as well drink two. One for my dad too, eh?"
Whump, whump, whump...bam.
It started raining on the way home and I began to think of all the things I've really been neglecting. The mails I get and don't find the energy to answer. The times I speak to myself in bed and say the very words I'd like to be writing down. But I knew I was seeing it all with blurred vision. The merriment was solely in the knowledge that I'd beaten the old man. I'd stolen some more of his time.
In high school my best friend and I were walking through the park one day and we saw a kid playing ball with his dad. I told him my dad never did that kind of shit with me. He turned to me and said, "Mine did, you didn't miss much."
At the time it sounded pretty damn good to me. I was never lacking for anything. I seemed happy enough. Never really gave it much thought unless it was right there in my face, but then I got older and wanted answers and when I got them I wanted to forget them again. I couldn't make up the time, but I couldn't stop the memories from inventing themselves either. I was powerless. Incapable of disliking the man, and yet not knowing how to love him.
And so on nights like Friday, he'll slip into my mind after a few drinks coupled with a cool summer breeze and the sounds of a distant ballgame. He'll be there like the heavy steel train cars coupled down the tracks by Pomona. And like the engine backing those damn cars together my mind will keep pumping out the fantasy until only another PBR will satisfy. A certain walk. A mood. A mindset pure and simple in definition but the opposite in the actual execution. Gaining momentum with the weight of it all until I become a worthless wreck staring another Saturday afternoon in the face from the mild comfort of my bedsheets; wondering how it got there.
And it always seems like such a good idea at the time.
It really does.
goodnight 8.24.99